Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,
I have a data file and need to load the data into tables in a database. The problem is I cannot use a while loop with each line as the data is free text and has all kinds of weird characters including carriage returns and new line characters.
Each column is separated by ~^~ and a new line by ^~EOR~^
so an example would be

ID NAME DESCRIPTION

123~^~SAM~^~HELLO^~EOR~^
~^~~^~HELLO^~EOR~^
456~^~~^~^~EOR~^

How do I separate different columns from above.
Thanks in advance...

See if this helps you:

Code:

sed -e 's/^M/ /g' -e 's/~^~/|/g' -e 's/\^~EOR~\^/|/' input_file

Where '^M' is ctl-M (entered as ctl-V+ctl-M)

Check out talend open studio (Free & Open Source) which makes this kind of transform trivial. It's all point and click and can optionally produce Java or Perl code to do the trick in future.

-c